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Mid-July Link Assortment

From Christopher Huang, we had the small mystery puzzler Mustard, Music, and Murder. B Minus Seven released At Anchor, a brief and poetic story about searching a beach for items.

I’ve also been hearing good things about Open Sorcery, a sizable Twine game from Abigail Corfman that came out in May. One version is free, but there’s a larger, more expanded version for iOS or Android that you can buy.

Meanwhile, the Texture IF tool has a significant update and now has a library of available works and a number of improvements. The library includes new work from Jim Munroe, Robert Yang, and Jake Elliott. And if your tastes run more to inkle’s tool ink, the new inky project provides an editor for working with that system.

Images Across a Shattered Sea is new from Steward C. Baker on Sub-Q Magazine, though reprinted from Writers and Illustrators of the Future 32. Unless I’m misunderstanding (conceivable!), the original version was non-branching text, and that it has been reworked for Twine: in the current version, it’s structurally an unfriendly gauntlet until the final act, when there are branches leading to two more fully-fleshed outcomes.

It’s an interesting piece for several reasons, but one is that it reads very much as something that comes from the genre expectations of SFF publishing, rather than from the genre expectations of traditional or Twine IF. The first several pages are about setting up the rules of this universe, in order to then explore what they can do.

Here’s a review of a tabletop version of an escape room. This sounds slightly strange — the sense of immediate presence is essential to what escape rooms are about, generally — but it sounds potentially entertaining.